1. inMusic’s Stuart Murphy. 2. Novation’s Kody Standridge. 3. Jazz pianist Patrice Rushen plays Roland’s new V-Stage performance keyboard at the company’s booth. 4. Bosendorfer’s Ferdinand Braeu. 5. Roland’s Ed Diaz.
to access useful sounds and functions quickly was a major trend at this year’s NAMM. As Roland rolled out its V-Stage 88 and V-Stage 76 Performance Keyboards, the company played up the instruments’ speedy workflow and intuitive navigation with a user interface based on the VR760 from 2003. “Our live players, they want quick access,” said Roland’s Ed Diaz during a break from demoing the new keyboards. “We have other big synthesizers with lit- erally thousands of sounds, but a lot of those you have to go in and preset. With these you can go in on the fly and just jump around in there.” He proceeded to
demonstrate how easy it was for him to combine organ sounds and clavinet, using the volume pedal to adjust the volume balance of each. “For the live player, they can trigger a bunch of fun stuff, and very quickly. And if I want to, I can easily turn off different sections and turn on other sections.” Another hot commodity was the No- vation Bass Station plugin from GForce Software, which transforms an iconic analog mono-synth into a virtual instru- ment with an expanded feature set that goes well beyond many of the limitations of the original 1993 synth, enabling big- ger, fatter, layered low-frequency sounds.
“We took the original Bass Station as a starting point and made it a polyphonic synth with 16 voices and added a sequence section,” said Kody Standridge, product specialist for Focusrite Audio, owner of the Novation brand. “We added the effects up here on top as well, things that people were naturally adding to the BassStation: choruses, reverbs, delays and more — we went ahead and put all that in the plugin for them, plus you also get 300 presets with the plugin version that make it fast and simple to navigate.” GForce Bass Station is now included with Novation’s Launchkey MK4, SL MkIII and FLKey DAWs and controllers. MI
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